Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Tuesday, June 11, 2019 -- Mattie died 507 weeks ago today. 

Tonight's picture was taken in June of 2008. Mattie was six years old and enjoying his time with Peter on the Potomac River. Peter took Mattie in a canoe quite often on the weekends. Since Mattie loved boats and adventure, this was right up his alley. 



Quote of the day: Every noble work is at first impossible. ~ Thomas Carlyle

We had the opportunity to visit the USA's only tea plantation.... Charleston's Tea Plantation. It is over 140 acres and each crop of tea is divided into twenty different sections. Very well thought out, as tea needs to be harvested every twenty days. So in the spring and summer months, one man on a giant machine is harvesting a crop every day of the week. 

Dr. Charles Shepard is considered the founder of the plantation. As he was growing tea plants in the 1800's in a different part of South Carolina. South Carolina has the ideal weather and soil for tea plants. In the 1960's, William Hall took several cuttings from Shepard's tea plants (which by that point had been abandoned, neglected, and growing high like trees) and began cultivating them in Charleston.  So in essence the Charleston Tea Plantation celebrates over 100 years of tea production in the USA (as the crops we saw today are descendants of Shepard's plants).

This is what tea plants look like. Believe it or not, they are a form of the camellia plant. The plants are kept short, and the only usable part of the plant is the new growth on the top of the bush (called the flush). It is the new growth that is harvested every 20 days. 

Tea bushes can be productive for hundreds of years. Although it does produce tea pods for reproduction, general new plants are created with 5 inch cuttings taken from existing plants, potted, and placed in a nursery. It takes 5 years for the tea plant to grow to maturity. 

We had the opportunity to take a 30 minute tram tour around the plantation. Which was very informative. We got to see a tea nursery and also learn a lot about tea production. 

Note for tea drinkers, I would consider removing decaffeinated tea from your repertoire. To remove the natural caffeine in tea leaves, acetone and formaldehyde are used. 

All tea is made from this camellia bush. Of course in different regions of the world, it may taste different because of the soil. The tea bush can produce black, oolong, and green teas. The difference is NOT in the plant but in the oxidizing process of the tea leaf. 

I couldn't resist taking a photo by one of the large props!

There is a free factory tour as well. Here you watch several videos on how tea is produced. 

After the tea leaves have been picked, they are laid out on giant wire mesh belts to a depth of 12 inches. Warm air is circulated from below, up through the leaves as they sit on the belt for about 18 hours. During this step the tea leaf wilts and loses about 15% of its moisture. Next the leaves are put through a machine called a rotor-vane. Inside a cylindrical chamber which contains high speed rotating vanes, the leaves are torn, and broken into millions of tiny pieces. Once the tea leaf has been crushed and torn, the broken leaves are laid out in troughs to a depth of 2-3 inches. In this step the tea will move extremely slowly along a moving belt for some 50 minutes during which time the interaction of the air with the juices from the broken leaf oxidize the leaf and turn if from a green color to a brownish color. This process is referred to as fermentation and basically is creating flavor that has come to be known as black tea.

A piece of info: black tea requires 50 minutes of oxidating (which is why its a more flavorful tea)
oolong tea requires 15 minutes of oxidating
green tea requires 0 minutes of oxidating

There is a wonderfully aromatic gift shop at the plantation. There you can taste several different varieties of tea for FREE. Cold and hot teas! It was almost like walking into a perfume factory, it was that fragrant. 

Note: Iced tea was created in America. We are the only country that consumes it by the way, and it accounts for about 80% of tea consumption in the USA. 

Though the tea is grown here and processed here, it is actually boxed in Philadelphia by the Bigelow company. 

Want to know what this is? It is a tea flower blossom. They come out once a spring. Our tour guide said the flowers are not fragrant, but they look like popcorn that has exploded in the tea fields. 

Some more trivia: 1) after water, tea is the most popular beverage consumed here and around the world, 2) 6 billion pounds of tea is produced EVERY year around the world, and 3) 34 Countries produce tea!